Moving targets, moving politics: The state of play in social media data access

Summary

This Forum article offers a state-of-play assessment of social media data access for political communication research in early 2026, centered on the EU Digital Services Act’s Article 40 vetted researcher provisions. De Vreese and Tromble argue that the current turbulence — platform foot-dragging, opaque procedures, legal pushback, and geopolitical contestation — should be read not as regulatory failure but as a signal that binding regulation is finally biting into entrenched platform power. They urge the field to resist “regulatory fatigue” and instead commit to a marathon of implementation, monitoring, and complementary institutional scaffolding rather than redesigning the architecture under pressure.

Key Contributions

• A state-of-play assessment of EU data access governance for political communication researchers as of early 2026.
• A reframing of friction in DSA Article 40 implementation as evidence of regulatory effectiveness rather than dysfunction.
• A strategic “stand firm” agenda emphasizing enforcement, monitoring, and infrastructure-building over architectural redesign.
• Historical situating of Article 40 within a trajectory from informal API access through voluntary codes to binding obligations.
• A warning that regulatory retreat would consolidate platform discretion precisely at the moment it is being challenged.

Methods

Analytical commentary and policy review rather than empirical study. The authors trace the evolution of EU platform data access governance from 2010s API/scraping practices through the Code of Practice on Disinformation to the DSA and its late-2024 Delegated Act, drawing on early implementation experiences and their own participation in the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) working group on data access.

Findings

• The 2010s produced a profound informational asymmetry between platforms and researchers, normalized rather than treated as a governance problem.
• Voluntary instruments like the Code of Practice on Disinformation hit their limits whenever platforms’ commercial or political interests were at stake.
• The EDMO working group helped reframe data access as a public policy question and shaped a Code of Conduct aligned with the DSA.
• Article 40 marks a qualitative shift: binding legal rights for vetted researchers studying systemic risks, balanced against privacy, security, and trade-secret concerns.
• Early implementation shows opaque procedures, inconsistent timelines, unclear contact points, under-resourced regulators, and strategic ambiguity from platforms — predictable forms of resistance.
• Implementation now unfolds in a politicized geopolitical context entangled with free speech debates and transatlantic tensions.

Connections

This piece sits at the regulatory-policy pole of the platform governance and APIs cluster, complementing companion Forum contributions on Article 40 such as Ohme2026-nv. It speaks directly to broader critical accounts of platform-controlled access regimes like Rieder2026-pp and Rieder2025-ju, and to documentation of the post-API researcher predicament in Freelon2024-sc and Davis2025-ws — though the closest empirical complements to its “moving targets” diagnosis are works tracking deplatforming of research infrastructure such as Bak-Coleman2025-pm and analyses of DSA-era access in practice including Bruns2026-yv.

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